RE: Dimensions and trimming of the MS
Diane > 07-12-2017, 09:55 AM
David - sorry, our posts crossed.
I'm not sure how much you know about codicology but an important aspect of provenancing concerns the form and materials as such - regardless of what is written on it.
My thinking ran: if there is no sign of pricking or ruling out, this manuscript is extremely unusual for a manuscript supposed to be an expression of Latin European culture and habits.
With regard for various other historical events and incidents - which I won't repeat here, but which I have already written about one - we know that the less fine manuscripts made in various parts of Europe during the early fifteenth century were not made (as they had been in monastic times), by folding and cutting sheets of membrane in-house, but were purchased in prepared quires or bifolia from stationers who were licensed to operate - often near a university.
Second point: if Beinecke MS 408 was prepared from ready-made bifolia, as is likely from the historical evidence, and since there is also no sign that the block-book was ever sliced down to size, either after the first making or later during a re-binding (as there isn't), then we must assume until we see the inside folds there never was any ruling out of the bifolia before inscription. Most unusual, but not unknown among Jewish works.
Separately: by mapping where and when we find the same fairly unusual dimensions for standard bifolia, we ought to be better able to narrow the range within which (and perhaps even by which part of the population) the present manuscript's manufacture and inscription should be attributed.
That in mind, I then turned to survey the entire collection of manuscripts in the British LIbrary (inviting any readers who cared to help, to survey another library collection of their choice... none did). As I've said the results were that (a) the dimensions are indeed unusual; (b) they indicate a narrow period for manufacture; © they offer a strong suggestion of Jewish input.
This input, in terms of the bifolia, could be supposed no more than the merchant's supply of membrane in ready-made bifolia...because (as I found and explained) Jewish parchminers had a European network so efficient that it had been the means by which the Papal library records and documents had been copied in short order for the return to Rome from Avignon in 1375. (again, I've written and published on that matter).
So now, looking more widely at this question of Jewish works and paper production (because works on paper often had no ruling out, just as the VMS does not) I then did the necessary weeks of work and found, in the end, that the line led back to earlier Cairo and what had once been a standard dimension for paper produced there.
My hypothesis then is that some Jewish parchminers continued to produce works in those dimensions (so rare in Latin Europe so far as I can discover), but that not many did; most adopted the official standards enforced in e.g. Bologna.
As I said, I found only two works with precisely the same dimensions; many more with the long dimension and of those the vast majority were Jewish works.
Rene's intruding or introducing the little diagram he presented in a slide show, in 2010, to an audience which did not include me seems to be either due to his failing to see the great difference in our aims, or as an effort to claim credit for my work (which is hardly likely to impress, and I shall not suspect him of it), or it is one of those distractions constantly dropped into the middle of any reasoned or evidence based discussion which shows fairly clearly one of the great many holes in one or other theoretically-constructed history for the mss, usually 'central European' in some way.
I really don't know why he included it in the thread. But perhaps others see his motives more clearly.
Anyway, let's end the thread here, shall we?